From Confused to Confident

By Mayank Bubna

As a South Asian who speaks at least five languages, a recent political event in Washington encouraged me to think about the state of being bilingual or trilingual.

In mid-May, the United States Senate voted to make English the ''national language" of the United States. In an amendment to a major immigration bill that is still being finalized, the measure declared that no one has a right to federal communications or services in a language other than English. The measure is mainly directed at Spanish-speaking Americans, who often receive medical services in their mother tongue or vote using a Spanish-language ballot.

While I doubt that we'll see ballots for a United States election in Hindi or hear the Star- Spangled Banner sung in Tamil during our lifetime, I am bewildered that no one in the Senate really pondered over what this "English" might include.

Does English as the national language include tolerance for the inaccurate articulations that most Americans use (example: Eye-Ran, Eye-Raq)? Does it also include the linguistic and grammatical errors that Americans are subjected to on their news channels every day? Maybe they should have just made "American" as the national language.

I am an Indian citizen. I went to a Jesuit School during my childhood. I am not a seasoned linguist, but I know my grammar. When I first came to the United States as a high-school student, I hardly expected to have any problems with language. After all, I had trained with some lingo-giants back home. Mr. N, my English teacher, was rumored to regularly pick on the flaws of William Safire of the New York Times.

What was I to know? As soon as I unpacked my bags in the dorm room near my private boarding school in North Carolina and went to orientation, I met my new American friends who wanted to teach the Indian kid a thing or two about how to use language. By the end of the first week in high school, I did what anyone else would do when surrounded by a band of guys hovering in the twilight of their teens—I succumbed to the peer pressure and adopted their rebellion. By the end of the second week, I was as fluent in “American” as I was in English. By the end of the third week, “English” (the European/Indian version) had become my second language.

My new teachers, self-acclaimed guardians of the sacredness of the English language, didn't do much either to help my transition into this alien atmosphere. They rapped my knuckles to make me drop the u's in all my papers. Hence, "Dialogue" became "dialog"; "monologue" gave way to "monolog," and imagine my horror when I had to spell "favour" as "favor." My inevitable urge to put u's everywhere even cost me a place on my school's spelling-bee team. I turned to my then-roommate for solace. His explanation of this heinous spelling-crime was simple: It was a way to save millions of barrels of ink and thousands of sheets of paper every year; drop the u's from words to save trees and then make up for it by producing more toilet paper rolls.

The most troubling moment came during prom night. I visited the room of my date to check on her readiness. She had emptied out her entire wardrobe on the floor, trying out every possible garment. "So, what do you think?" she finally asked. "Whore!" I chuckled (It was a remark not directed at her, but meant in jest about the untidiness of her room). She looked at me stunned. Two seconds later, a hard slap landed directly across my face, giving a whole new meaning to the words "punch line". "Mayank, do you even know what 'whore' means?" asked a friend. "Yes … untamed pig." He shook his head and handed me a dictionary.

My time in college was only slightly better. After having spent two years in a private school in the Deep South, I missed Indian food, Indian people and most of all, my matra-bhasha (mother-tongue). So I looked forward to attending Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and reconnecting with Indians.

During freshmen orientation in college, I overheard a couple Bombayites whispering expletives that only a fellow Bombayite could truly appreciate. It was music to my ears. I began hanging out with these new friends all the time. Very soon, however, each and every one of them betrayed me by adopting the very same Americanized grammar that I had been trying to avoid all along.

I had to change my network of friends, but it was next to impossible to find such people on campus. So I went online.

The Internet was a whole new linguistic world for me. E-mail and chat-room aficionados were completely lacking in proper English language protocol. It was as if someone had taken the language and squeezed out all the alphabets from it leaving behind apostrophes and colons to do the work that words formerly did. I don't remember how many countless hours I spent scratching my head trying to figure out what ttyl's and lolz's meant. Shamefully, I turned to my 12-year old niece for help.

I have come to realize over time that I am quite against the new web-English that has been floating around since the past few years. Dropping the u's was tolerable, but this new e-English is just atrocious, simply bollocks and completely inexcusable.

Samuel Johnson, the famed English lexicographer, is probably turning in his grave and shaking his fist at the World Wide Web. Since the past year or so, I have tried my best to avoid this disastrous mutation to the English language.

College was also a time when politics caught my interest. Interestingly, Sanskrit made a huge entry in the English language around this time. Words like "avatar," "pundits," "karma," began cropping up in newspapers, websites and people's titles. Of course, the flexibility assigned to the usage of these words was a little out of hand. If only people really knew what religious implications "Hare-Krishna" might actually have among the more orthodox Hindus, maybe they would be a little careful of the words' usage.

Finally, I return to the questions I posed at the beginning of my essay. What sort of English have the U.S. Senators actually nationalized? Definitely not the kind I'm familiar with. Regrettably, there is little that can be done to change the nature of the system. Language, like everything else, changes over time. Meanwhile, all we can do is hold tight on to our semicolons and commas and hope for the best. As my former roommate always said, "A little bad grammar never hurt nobody!"

Mayank Bubna is a graduate student at New York University getting his MA in Politics. He has been living in the United States for seven years now and rotates between American English and Indian English. In the near future, he hopes to travel to foreign lands and explore other variations of the language.

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